Bicycle Repairman

I have had a adventure.

The other day, in the rain, I caught somebody trying to steal the wheel from my bicycle.

The bicycle was on the back of the camper van, which is parked in the middle of the village. Somebody has told me that I should not call it a camper van, it is a motor home, and I ought to say that in order not to mislead people. They followed this with a long and boring explanation of the various distinctions by which you could tell the difference, to which I did not listen.

When we first bought it it was French, and we were in France, so we called it a Camping Car, because that is what French camper vans are called. This stuck for ages when we came back to England, until we realised that nobody else had the first idea what we were talking about, and it became a camper van.

Anyway, our bicycles were on the back.

You have probably never seen our bicycles. They have been built by Mark out of bits of bicycle that he has ferreted out of skips, and they are every bit as beautiful and streamlined as this sort of bicycle generally is. To say they are rusty is an understatement. They are rusty, and battered, but undeniably useful, and the other day I was driving down the road in my taxi when I realised there was somebody standing next to them removing the front wheel.

Obviously I stopped.

The chap was in his thirties, thin and bald, with a backpack and an anxious expression. He realised that he had been Caught In The Act and leaped away from the van as if it had suddenly woken up and snarled at him.

I was very fierce.

I demanded to know what he had been doing, and how he dared help himself to pieces of my beautiful bicycle on my beautiful camper van. Even with a sore toe, readers, I squared up to him and towered over him and roared.

He burst into tears.

I was not mollified and demanded to know exactly what he had been up to.

He was very upset.

Eventually he confessed that he had been about to borrow, not steal, please don’t think that, please, I’m so sorry, so sorry, don’t call the police, I was only borrowing the wheel. I would have brought it back tomorrow, honestly.

I listened to this drivel for a little while and resisted the urge to tell him I thought he was a complete muppet. It turned out that he had come from Kendal on his own bicycle, which had got a flat tyre. Everywhere was closed, and he didn’t have any money, and he didn’t know what to do. He was going to have to walk back to Kendal pushing his flat-tyred bicycle.

Kendal is a long way away.

I helped him take the wheel off my bicycle and made him to promise he would bring it back before we went away on holiday on Tuesday, which I was quite sure he certainly wouldn’t, he did not seem to be a person with that level of organisational skill.

He didn’t even possess a telephone.

It was not exactly generous. Mark got the wheel out of a skip about ten years ago. It was not a great loss. If I was going to steal the wheel from a bicycle I would have had to be very desperate indeed before I considered that one, so I concluded that he was probably very desperate.

Mark sighed and said that although he does have some more wheels in his shed, he has been saving them and was going to build us another bicycle with them one day, and also that on the scale of bicycle wheels in our possession, it was one of the better ones.

I was only mildly troubled, since Oliver has left his bicycle in Scotland, and I thought it unlikely that Lucy would remember to bring hers, and so our trip to Blackpool was already going to be sadly depleted of bicycles

I was regretful about this. One of the nice things about Blackpool is the loveliness of sailing down the Golden Mile whilst eating doughnuts and yelling at the dogs, of such joyful moments are the best holidays made.

Today, readers, I went to load the camper van. We are leaving in just a little while now, and I was packing it up.

The wheel had been replaced on the back of my bicycle.

I am feeling very happy indeed.

What a brilliant start to a holiday.